


Second Verse (the Dead Before Dark Remix)

by Jain



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Community: remix_redux, Gen, POV Third Person, Past Tense, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-16
Updated: 2010-05-16
Packaged: 2017-10-09 12:17:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jain/pseuds/Jain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The more things change, the more they stay the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Verse (the Dead Before Dark Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SullenSiren (lorax)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorax/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Song Remains the Same](https://archiveofourown.org/works/76384) by [SullenSiren (lorax)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lorax/pseuds/SullenSiren). 



When Dean woke up, Sam had a shotgun leveled at his chest. He held up his hands quickly--though not so quickly that he startled Sam into _shooting_ him--and tried to project calmness and understanding, but couldn't quite restrain himself from saying, "Not this again."

"You're dead," Sam said, with tears and anger twisting his face.

"Whoa. Sam. Whatever you're upset about, we can work it out, okay?"

An ugly sob tore out of Sam's throat, but at least he finally dropped the fucking shotgun. Unfortunately, Dean only had a moment to appreciate not having a gun pointed at his chest before Sam said, "No, Dean, I mean you're literally dead. Right now."

Dean frowned at him. "Uh, Sam. I'm right here, dude. Maybe you saw a shapeshifter? Or some kind of hallucination?"

Sam shook his head, still crying. And it had just begun hitting Dean that he'd woken up not in his bed, but standing fully dressed in the middle of their hotel room, when Sam reached out to touch Dean's arm and his hand passed right through him.

"Well, _fuck_," Dean said.

* * *

As soon as Sam calmed down--which he did with minimal help from Dean, since comforting pats on the back were a little hard to manage if you were non-corporeal--he started trying to analyze the situation. At least he turned the TV on at Dean's request before he began throwing questions at Dean like, "Why'd it take you so long to materialize?" and "How did you get from the woods to here?" and "How'd you cross the salt line?"

That last was the only question that Dean had the first clue about. He shrugged, which was a weird experience: he could feel his shoulders moving and even the rub of flannel against his skin, but not the bed underneath him. "I don't think I _crossed_ it exactly. Felt like I just woke up, and I was here."

"Maybe because it was your first materialization after your death?" Sam suggested. "Or maybe you're attached to something in the room." His eyes wandered to Dean's duffel bag, even as his fingers rose to clasp the amulet around his neck.

"Yeah, maybe," Dean said noncommittally. He didn't even have to ask to know that Sam had salted and burned his corpse, so the theory made some sense. But Dean was pretty sure that nothing he owned had so strong a connection to him that it could keep him on Earth past his time, unless maybe shared genes counted.

"So...we've got options," Sam said, still toying with the amulet.

It took a second for Dean to figure out what he was saying, and once he did he boggled at his brother. "You want to get rid of me?"

Sam ducked his head, refusing to look him in the eye. "Only if you want me to," he said quietly.

"Hey, I'm still me here, Sammy," Dean said, though there was a horrible voice in his head whispering, _How can you be sure? What if you're losing pieces of yourself and you can't tell because of how much you've already lost?_ Dean shoved the voice away and continued uncomfortably, "Look, if I start...changing, if you think I'm turning into some sort of vengeful spirit, then you go ahead and waste me like you would any other ghost. But I don't want to check out any sooner than I have to, okay?"

"Okay," Sam said. He flopped back on his own bed, still looking worried and deeply unhappy, but Dean figured that that was only natural. He was maybe feeling a little bit the same way.

"And change the channel. This show sucks," he added. Sam groaned under his breath and rolled over to grab the remote.

* * *

When it was long enough after the night Dean died that they could pretend to have forgotten Sam's offer to waste him--Dean couldn't actually forget _anything_ as a ghost, which was occasionally useful in winning arguments against Sam, but mostly a pain in the ass--Sam asked, staring at the TV rather than Dean's face, "Do you think you're here because you're trying to protect me?"

Dean laughed bitterly. "What can I save you from now, Sammy?"

Sam didn't answer, and a minute later he rolled onto his side and faked sleep until he actually nodded off.

Dean waited a while, and then he got off of his bed and sat next to Sam. He always made sure to be in his own bed come morning, but at night Dean liked to settle down for his eight hours of uninterrupted TV viewing with Sam only inches away from him. Occasionally he traced his fingers over Sam's quiet features, watching Sam's expression change in response to the temperature difference. Dean couldn't feel Sam's skin, but it was still touching him, sort of.

* * *

Dean thought that if Sam had been the one who'd bought it instead of him, he'd have had to rig a heat-sensitive keyboard so that Sam's ghostly fingers could still type. Luckily, Dean was a lot easier to please; just stick him in front of the TV, preferably with some T&amp;A on the screen, and with Sam in the next bed over, and he was set.

Not that Sam could understand that, of course. They fought about it once; Sam got all pissy because Dean wanted his porn even though he couldn't jerk off to it. Dean couldn't figure out if Sam was upset because he thought that Dean was just going through the motions, or if he was upset because he knew that Dean wasn't.

In a way, Sam was right to flip out over the porn: it was pretty definitive proof that Dean actually was dead, trapped in a continuous loop that dated to the moment of his death. Anyone living would get bored with porn pretty quick if they were watching it without any chance of a payoff, but not Dean. He was stuck in the same mindset he'd had before he'd died, in which nakedness meant fun, happy times and naked boobs were all that times ten, and no amount of orgasm-free porn viewing was going to shake that perception.

* * *

Sam refused to go hunting, for reasons that Dean couldn't entirely understand and that Sam didn't want to talk about. But you didn't always have to go looking for a hunt for one to find you, and they stumbled across a vengeful spirit in Salem, Oregon.

The bad part--other than the par for the course bits--was that Dean couldn't see it. It was like he and the other ghost were running on different frequencies. Dean had had some sort of idea that he could keep the ghost occupied while Sam was dealing with its corpse, maybe engage in a little spectral hand-to-hand combat, only to discover that the two of them weren't even on the same wavelength.

The better part was that he managed to save Sam's ass, anyway. At one point the other ghost threw a wicked-looking letter opener at Sam, and all of Dean's previous failed attempts at pushing small objects got blasted into oblivion as he _punched_ the letter opener out of the air with his now impervious hands. The letter opener skittered across the floor, and Sam finished going about the business of finding the ghost's skeleton beneath the floorboards and tossing it into the living room fireplace for a salt-and-burn.

Afterwards, though, Dean kept falling through the floor on his way back to the car--which was pretty disgusting now that he knew what the previous owner liked to store down there. Dean and Sam were going to have to track the psycho down and see if they could find any other murders to link him to and send an anonymous tip to the police. Hopefully without having to clean up any more ghostly remnants of his crimes.

Maybe Dean needed more practice in moving objects, or maybe he was just a defective ghost. (That second was pretty plausible, given Dean's other weirdnesses, like still being _him_ rather than a seething mass of angry impulses and unfinished business.) Either way, it made Sam's face go pained every time he saw more evidence of Dean's incorporeality, so Dean didn't move things much except when Sam wasn't likely to be around and awake for the aftereffects.

* * *

Dean always gave kids a quick and dirty lesson before settling down for a chat. "Most ghosts aren't as nice as me," he told a chubby-cheeked little Asian boy in St. Louis. "But you can usually figure that out pretty fast, because the mean ghosts don't stop to talk. Best thing to do is to put a ring of salt around your bed, but I'm guessing your parents wouldn't be too happy about that."

The kid--Gabe--shook his head, looking serious and ridiculously vulnerable. Dean cleared his throat and said, "So the next best thing is to put down lines of salt on every windowsill and across the doorway. Solid lines, without any gaps."

"Can't the ghost walk through walls?" Gabe asked.

"Yeah, but most ghosts don't think of it. They don't usually realize that they're dead, so they play by the same rules that they used to have. Not to mention that there are other things out there that _can't_ walk through walls, so if you block the doors and windows, you're safe." (_Safer,_ anyway, but Dean was trying to educate Gabe, not scare the shit out of him.)

"Does the salt kill the ghost?" Gabe asked.

Dean shook his head. "Nope. It only keeps him from getting to you. So if anything like this ever happens, as soon as you're safe--that usually means when it's daytime--then you have to email my brother Sam and tell him what happened, and he can help."

At which point he would talk the kid through spelling Sam's email address--the youngest ones reversing letters all over the place, but hopefully they'd be okay if it ever came time to reread it--and making sure that the slip of paper was tucked away safely, or, better yet, that Sam's address was written on something the kid wouldn't lose easily, like the back page of a book.

He knew that 99% of them would forget about him within the year or decide they'd dreamed the whole thing, but that didn't keep him from making the effort. Even if it only saved one kid's life, that was better than nothing.

And then he could talk with the kids with a clear conscience, which was always fun. Like Gabe, who had a love of automated vehicles to rival Dean's. Admittedly, he was more interested in things like garbage trucks and cement mixers, but he was only seven; Dean figured he'd develop better taste as he got older.

* * *

Sam had a tendency to go to extremes, Dean knew this. So it figured that if Sam was ready to perform the ghostly version of euthanasia on Dean the night he died, he'd talk himself around to the idea of getting Dean back by any means necessary less than three months later.

Of course, he didn't bother asking Dean how _he_ felt about it. Surprisingly, being dead wasn't that bad, especially since Dean was pretty sure that he was only going to be sticking around as long as Sam was and not causing a problem for any civilians in the future.

Sam was a lot less accepting of their changed circumstances. Dean did his best to take that in stride, especially since things seemed to be improving. Sam was looking better, sleeping more, talking to Dean as though he might be getting used to the idea of having an undead brother.

The other shoe dropped when Dean sneaked a peek at the laptop screen over Sam's shoulder one night and saw a deeply sketchy website with the URL dearlydeparted.com. Dean slammed the laptop closed, catching a glimpse of Sam's startled face before Sam started shutting down his expression. "It's worth considering," Sam said in his ultra-reasonable lawyer's tone.

"No, it fucking isn't," Dean said. "We've gone down this road a lot of times in the past--or at least roads that look pretty damn similar--and it was always a mistake. And this time we don't have anyone but ourselves to clean up the mess, so we're going to do the smart thing and leave it alone."

"You're _dead_," Sam said, as though that were some sort of irrefutable argument.

"Yeah," Dean agreed. "And I'm okay with that, Sammy. What I'm _not_ okay with is you trying to bring me back when we both know how things go to shit when we do that."

"You'd do it for me," Sam said stubbornly.

"Maybe," Dean admitted. "But that doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do."

Sam gave him a sidelong glance.

"_Please,_" Dean said. "I don't want this. I don't want you to do this."

"Yeah, okay," Sam said, sounding half-defeated and half-relieved.

He looked like he needed a hug, but Dean couldn't give it to him. The best he could manage was to let Sam choose that evening's TV channel--and how sad was it that _TV_ had become Dean's highest form of currency. Which meant that they had a couple hours of Discovery and then, when even Sam got bored with watching endangered animals in their natural habitats, the History Channel for another couple of hours. If he were alive, Dean would've spent the entire time with a pillow over his head pretending to be asleep. Since that wasn't an option, he sucked it up and tried to take pleasure in Sam's enjoyment of the programs.

* * *

Sam was a pretty smart guy, but he had a tendency to navelgaze like no one else. Dean let it go on for a while--longer than he liked, really--because it had to be pretty traumatic to have your brother die even if said brother didn't actually leave as a result. (He considered and rejected the idea of making fun of Sam for being more broken up about Dean's death than _Dean_ was. It was true, but Dean wasn't so oblivious that he couldn't see that he was living in a pretty fragile glass house as far as that went.)

So he waited until he was certain that he was doing it for Sam and not for himself, and then he started scanning the newspapers that Sam bought out of habit even though all he did with them was play Sudoku and do the crosswords. A week later, he'd found a likely looking case and folded the newspaper and left it on the dresser for Sam.

Then he made an effort to not gloat when Sam packed their stuff--or, rather, _his_ stuff; he took some of Dean's shirts and socks and hoodies for himself, as well as Dean's weapons, and left the rest--and headed out. Dean felt a little worn out from manipulating the newspaper, but otherwise it was almost like it used to be when he'd been alive, listening to the hum of the Impala and letting his thoughts drift lazily while they drove through golden fields of grain with Sam by his side and a hunt ahead of them. Not that he'd ever mention this to Sam, but it didn't seem that far off from heaven to Dean.


End file.
